Before Salem: The Real-Life Werewolf Trials That Plagued European Nations

On October 31, 1589, in the German town of Bedburg, Peeter Stubbe was strapped to a wooden wheel, the flesh torn from his limbs with burning pincers, his arms and legs ripped from his torso. Using the blunt side of an ax-head, his limbs were broken, his head cut off, and everything burned on a pyre. His daughter watched in horror as she herself was flayed, strangled, and burned alongside him.

“In the townes of Cperadt and Bedburg neer unto Collin in high Germany, there was continually brought up and nourished one Stubbe Peeter,” reads the translation of a 16th-century pamphlet titled, A true Discourse: Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter, a most wicked Sorcerer, who in the likenes of a Woolfe, committed many murders, continuing this divelish practise 25. yeeres, killing and devuouring Men, Woomen, and Children.

Facing his imminent death, Peeter Stubbe confessed to practicing dark magic from age 12 on. He said the Devil gave him a belt that allowed him to transform into a wolf, and as a wolf, he killed and ate 14 children and two pregnant women whose fetuses he ripped from their wombs and described as “dainty morsels.” His own son was one of the 14 children. Stubbe confessed to having eaten his brain.

“He had at that time living a faire yong Damosell to his Daughter,” the written account continues, “after whom he also lusted most unnaturallye, and cruellye committed most wicked inceste with her, a most groce and vilde sinne, far surmoun∣ting Adultrye or Fornication.” Stubbe was also accused of sleeping with a succubus sent to him by the Devil.

After his death, townsfolk erected a pole in the center of Bedburg, on which sat the torture wheel, a wolf figure, and Peeter Stubbe’s head.

This happened a full century before the witch trials in Salem, but it was not an isolated incident. The trial and eventual killing of Peeter Stubbe stands out as one of the harshest, most violent public executions of the witch trial era, but all across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, people were being accused of much more than witchcraft.

They were being accused of lycanthropy: transforming into wolves.

The Origins of the Werewolf Trials

The earliest instance of lycanthropic allegations begins with the first documented witch trials in Valais, Switzerland, in 1428. Roughly 370 people were killed at Valais. Only 20 were killed at Salem — and just like Salem, most of the accused were women, though, in Valais, many men were killed for being wed to a woman accused of witchcraft.

Accusations of lycanthropy were rare but were briefly documented alongside the Valais trials by Swiss chronicler Johannes Fründ and later expanded upon in the book Formicarius written by Johannes Nider during the Council of Florence.

Nider is one of the first to imply that magic was not the study of educated men, as many had believed, but rather the work of uneducated women. Women, he said, were weaker than men morally, physically, and mentally and succumbed more easily to devil worship, committing vile deeds such as cannibalism, flying, pillaging wine cellars, and conspiring to overturn Christianity.

This period, from 1580 to 1662, is known as The Burning Times. An estimated 50,000 people were burned at the stake, roughly 80% of them women. Germany — then the Holy Roman Empire — was home to most of the largest witch trials, particularly those in Trier, Fulda, Würzburg, and Bamberg.

In 1590, James VI of Scotland feared witches’ plots to kill him after severe storms impeded him on the road home from Denmark, where he had just claimed his bride, Anne. Upon returning to Scotland, James caught word of a witch trial happening in North Berwick and demanded to see the accused, among whom was Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell. James accused Francis of being a witch, forcing him to flee the country as an outlaw. James later wrote a book called Daemonologie, which touched on demons, vampires, and werewolves.

Accusations of lycanthropy didn’t remain isolated to the Northern parts of Europe, however.

The French (Werewolf) Connection

In 1521, two Frenchmen by the names of Michel Verdun and Pierre Burgot confessed to devil worship. At the edge of the woods, they danced in the dark blue flames of special candles and rubbed ointment on themselves to transform into wolves. Burgot killed a seven-year-old boy. Verdun had killed five girls and ate four of them.

On the outskirts of Dole lived a reclusive hermit named Gilles Garnier. Recently married, his wife moved in with him, but the marriage was turbulent, riddled with arguments and disaffection. Garnier had survived fine on his own but suddenly found it difficult to provide enough food for two people. One night, while hunting in the woods, he said, a specter appeared before him, offering him an ointment that would allow him to transform into a wolf.

Shortly thereafter, several children went missing in the Franche-Comté Province, and authorities encouraged locals to hunt the werewolf down. It didn’t take long for a group of men to find Garnier hunched over the body of a dead child. He confessed to stalking and murdering at least four children, devouring their flesh raw, and regularly breaking off a leg to take home to his wife. He was sentenced to be burned at the stake by a secular council.

Many stories of lycanthropic transformation in France involve using a salve, leading some historians to believe the salve may have been a hallucinogenic of some kind.

Another Frenchman, Jacques Roulet, was discovered shivering in the bushes after two hunters chased wolves that had been feeding off a 15-year-old’s corpse into the woods. Roulet was half-naked, covered in blood, and had bits of flesh clinging to his fingernails. Immediately, the men accused him of murdering the 15-year-old.

Roulet claimed that he’d turned into a wolf after drinking a salve given to him by his parents. He also claimed that his brother, Jean, and his cousin, Julien, took the salve and that the three of them would go hunting together. After appealing his death sentence, Roulet was sentenced to two years in a mental institution.

In total, the French accused roughly 30,000 people of lycanthropy between 1530 and 1640. It didn’t end there, though. In 1764, a 14-year-old girl named Jeanne Boulet was brutally killed, her body torn to shreds — the work of a vile, terrifying beast. She lived in a southern region of France called Gévaudan, a land described by author Jay M. Smith as an “isolated backwater where the forces of nature had not been full tamed, where the forests were indeed enchanted.”

The Beast of Gévaudan, as it became known, killed nearly 300 people over the course of three years. News of the beast traveled fast as the press spread stories of its attacks — largely, in part, due to political censorship from the king. Coming out of the Seven Years’ War, France was no longer the supreme force it had once been. It had something to prove. 30,000 men volunteered to hunt the beast, King Louis XV offering a year’s salary to whoever could slay it.

Some locals actually survived attacks from the beast, including Marie-Jeanne Valle, who wounded it in the process, earning herself the title of the Maiden of Gévaudan. In Auvers Village, there is a statue in her honor. Many accounts described the beast as larger in breadth than a horse and longer in length than a leopard. Some even claimed it had supernatural abilities: standing on its hind legs, its hide reflecting bullets, and coming back from the dead.

They never did catch the beast, nor did they determine what it really was.

Mass Manipulation by the Catholic Church

By now, you might have noticed a trend with these trials. They coincide with major turning points in the history of these countries.

In the Holy Roman Empire, many of these trials occurred during or after the Thirty Years’ War as Roman Catholicism stamped out Protestantism in many parts of Germany.

In France, the Renaissance was in full swing, but the 16th century also saw tension between Protestants and Catholics that came to a head in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. In the 17th century, France became a dominant power in Europe under the rule of Henry IV, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV — the Sun King — but by the end of the 18th century, France had lost much of its power and conceded many of its overseas territories, notably Canada.

As with the Salem Witch Trials, religious puritanism inspired fear-mongering about Satanic rituals, black magic, impurity, sin, and monsters. Possibly, Peeter Stubbe was a serial killer and cannibal, but the concept of psychopathy wasn’t yet in the average person's mind. Instead, they latched onto what they knew. The Church spoke of the Devil’s sway on humanity, of his power and tempting nature. The Devil, the Church said, could turn men into wolves that commit depraved, animalistic acts. Women who were disloyal to their husbands were tempted by the Devil, not by complex human emotions.

The trials were not trials at all. Once accused, there was no defending one’s innocence. If you confessed, you were burned at the stake. If you didn’t, you were tortured until you did. Thus, there’s also the possibility that Peeter Stubbe only confessed out of fear — he was wealthy, but more importantly, he was a Protestant. The Church could certainly have made an egregious example out of him, warning others to follow their rules.

We’ll never know. The only official account of the incident makes claims of lycanthropy, sex demons, and a magical belt — that’s the story we’ve been left.

At the same time, along the Baltic sea, to the north was a country known as Livonia. Germany had established a strong presence in Livonia, and Baltic-Germans living in the region followed the Church’s teachings. However, the indigenous population of Livonia had been practicing Pagans before the Germans arrived, and many continued to practice Paganism well into the 17th-century in defiance of the Church. They did not believe in Satan, let alone witches and Satanic pacts.

But that didn’t mean they didn’t believe in werewolves — they did, just not in their Satanic roots as the Church would have people believe. When Livonians confessed to lycanthropy, they claimed to have a wolf skin hidden away somewhere — perhaps under a rock — and given it by a stranger, a demon, or, commonly, a man in black.

Such was the case in 1651 when an 18-year-old named Hans confessed to having been a werewolf for two years after being bitten by a man in black. The Church, however, being the authority in the region, punished people per European laws, not the laws of the Baltic.

They determined that Hans must have surely made a pact with Satan to become a werewolf. There was, in their eyes, simply no other way, and so Hans was sentenced to death for witchcraft, not lycanthropy.

40 years later, in 1692, another Livonian man was brought in as a witness in a church robbery case. His name was Thiess, and he was in his 80s at the time. Thiess shocked the Church when he openly proclaimed, unprompted, that, yes, the local rumors were true, he was a werewolf — but not a Devil-worshipping werewolf. In fact, he called himself a “hound of God,” and stated that he and others like him would, three times a year, turn into wolves and venture to Hell to do battle with the Devil and the witches who worshipped him. In his account, Thiess told judges how he and his brethren ventured to Hell to reclaim stolen livestock, fruits, and grains and gift the towns with bountiful harvests.

The judges did not sentence Thiess to death. They publicly flogged him and banished him for life for attempting to turn people against the Church. In the end, it had less to do with his claims of being a werewolf and more to do with his practicing of folk music and blessing grains without mentioning God.

The Catholic Church is controversial. As more scandals come to light, we would do well to keep the Church’s history in mind—the Church has never been as pure as it likes to portray. For much of history, it has been an oppressive force wielding unlimited power to strike fear into the people it swears to protect.

In a world severely lacking in scientific knowledge, the Church was able to convince entire nations that “impure women” were casting spells on the townsfolk, that the Devil would take you in the night, and that the murderer down the street turned into a wolf under a full moon. They did this not to protect people but to further perpetuate their regime as righteous.

Salem is just one of many foul blemishes on the face of American history, but it was not an outlier.